Saturday, March 18, 2017

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! The
Russians are coming!

Scarcely an hour passes when a Trump detractor is not
filling the airwaves with innuendo about how our president is a Russian stooge
who won the election with the help of KGB agent Vladimir Putin and an assortment of
Kremlin gremlins.

The drumbeat is constant. While pretending to uphold the
highest democratic ideals the Resistance is undermining confidence in the
election. It’s not a pretty picture.

Writing in Quartz James Carden argues that it reminds him of
the Red Scare from the 1950s, and thus, of McCarthyism and the John Birch
Society. For record Carden has extensive
conservative bona fides while also writing for the decidedly liberal
publication, The Nation.

True enough, as the bard aptly pointed out, “comparisons are
odorous,” but still the current Red Scare does have a certain affinity with the
manias of prior days.

Carden explains:

The
tendency to blame domestic disappointments on foreign bogeymen is not new and
is perhaps better understood as a wave that periodically surfaces, then
temporarily subsumes American politics. Indeed, this current reliance on
conspiracy theories and accusations of unpatriotic disloyalty has been a
feature, not a bug, of discourse regarding Russia since the onset of the crisis
in Ukraine in early 2014. Yet this paranoia is, so far, little more than a
distraction. By blaming Clinton’s loss on Russia, the political establishment
is able to largely ignore the way economic, trade, and foreign policies failed
large numbers of Americans. And, by elevating Vladimir Putin to supervillain
status, this neo-McCarthyism is hindering debate and undermining legitimate attempts
to deescalate tensions with our Russian colleagues.

The current Red Scare is a loser’s lament. It signals the
political establishment’s failure to accept that it lost the election. It
signals the Democratic Party’s inability to accept that it was decisively
repudiated by the American electorate. After all, Trump was anything but the
strongest of Republican candidates. If you cannot beat Trump, you have a
problem. Ergo, the establishment has declared that it didn’t really lose. That
it cannot possibly be as incompetent as it appeared. That the American people
still loved Barack Hussein Obama. That the American people could not be so
lacking in gratitude that they would reject the wisdom of government
bureaucrats and behavioral economists.

One can only conclude that the election was stolen … by the
big bad Russians. One recalls, if only for the sake of amusement, the moment in
2009 when newly minted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—a woman whose
qualifications consisted of her name and her XX chromosomes—presented the
Russian foreign minister with a plastic toy.

She wanted to show that the big bad Bush administration was
no longer in charge and that she, in her vainglorious superiority would reset
relations with Russia. This supine and mindless gesture showed that Hillary was
not ready to play in the big leagues. Kowtowing to the Russians she was suggesting that the
Bush team had been too mean.

For the record, the Russian minister looked at her pathetic
attempt to be diplomatic and said that the State Department has mistranslated
the word for “reset.” In diplospeak he was dismissing
Hillary with contempt. If he had wanted to be more respectful, he would have
said that he accepted the gracious gesture.

Just think what we are missing.

Anyway, Carden points out that Rachel Maddow—presumably a
towering intellect—now known for having hyped the death out of two pages of
Trump’s 2005 tax returns—it’s the ratings, stupid—has been suggesting that
Trump is really a Russian agent. Conspiracy theories and paranoid thinking have
found a home on the American left:

Rachel
Maddow has been among the most vociferous and, at times, most incisive critics
of president Trump. Yet she also recently questioned whether Trump is actually
under the control of the Kremlin.

Is there any evidence that Russia rigged the election and is
now pulling the strings in the White House? All indications say No:

While
many have convinced themselves that Russia tipped the scale of the election
toward Trump, the more sinister allegations of Putin infiltrating the White
House have not been born out. Even the former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper admitted in an
interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd in early March that he has “no
knowledge” and “no evidence” of “collusion” between Russia and the Trump
campaign.

Think of it, Rachel Maddow is leading the new
Red Scare:

Yet
Maddow’s charge recalls some of the worst excesses of the early 1950’s, when
our political life was marred by the Red Scareand a climate of paranoia prevailed.
Unsubstantiated allegations,
not dissimilar to the kind Maddow just levied, were characteristic of
that era. Back then, none other than senator Joseph McCarthy himself, wondered:
“How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high
in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” Several years
later, Robert W. Welch, founder of the far-right John Birch Society, accused
president Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a “a dedicated, conscious agent of the
Communist conspiracy.”

Maddow is hardly alone. Consider the case of Jonathan Chait,
from New York Magazine:

“Today’s Russia dupes” wrote Chait, “are a
smaller, more pathetic lot. Above all they are just plain weirder, because they
lack a clear ideological motive for their stoogery.”

What is driving the narrative? What is making these
otherwise rational minds get mired in the fever swamps of paranoid
thinking? Carden attributes it to resentment, a failure to accept the fact that
they and their champions, their heroines, lost an election that they should
have won easily. Call it Nietzschean resentment or the plaintive wails of the
sore losers. In no way is it going to become the rallying cry for a political
movement:

Rather
than being driven by a wave of popular sentiment, today’s hysteria is a product
of elite resentment, suspicion, and anger over Clinton’s loss to the populist
Trump. Then, of course, there is the added element of blame shifting. Democrats
are clearly seeking to blame Clinton’s loss on Russia, and the Kremlin offers a
convenient foreign target. But is it the Russians, or is it the
Clinton campaign that is really to blame?

3 comments:

Conspiracy theory never make people smarter, but clearly we are not a smart people at all, electing a buffoon like Trump. Does anyone recall Netanyahu laughing at Trump's innocence? It does look like Trump is Netanyahu's pet more than Putin.

And I rather think it makes sense that Russia wasn't "selling Trump over Clinton", rather they were selling chaos, and so conveniently the election of Trump keeps maximum chaos in America. Although I'm sure the Russians are yet concerned about "unpredictable" Trump, since chaos is only good up to some point.

But ignoring military conflicts, Trump's Kleptocracy presidency lies perfectly within Russia's interests and when the Russian people think they could do better than Putin, other Russians can say "Leaders are bad everywhere."

And when we get on our high horse and tell people to follow international law, and point out that torture is illegal, pro-torture leaders in any country can point to Trump's quotes and say "If its good enough for America, it's good enough for us."

The real conspiracy is what real conspiracies usually are - straight forward stupid people covering up their stupidity and doubling down on it.

At least "America's exceptionalism" can be laughed out the door for good. We're just the biggest bully on the block.

Anyone who sees the U.S. as an ally, someone to trust can finally give up that illusion. Surely even puppet master Netanyahu will regret his picking the Republican party as his BFF.